Skin and Bone

by TA Moore

  “I’d need to convince myself first,” Javi said. He tapped the side of the coffee cup. “Can I get a refill before we start?”

  Sean stared at him for a second. Intrigue gradually replaced the suspicion on his face, and he picked up his phone.

  “Harry? I need two more coffees in here, and hold my calls,” he said. “I think we’ve got a new client.”

  THE PROTESTERS were back outside the bank. Farm trucks parked up on the sidewalk with Give Us Back Our Farms! banners duct-taped to the sides. Grim, weather-worn farmers with callused hands and mud-caked boots waved handwritten signs that demanded Fair Deals for Farmers next to skinny-jeaned hipsters from the coffee farms who waved dreadlocks and #Antitrust posters in the air. Other protesters, accompanied by their tired children, huddled together apart from the farmers, wearing T-shirts that cryptically demanded they Keep Plenty Plentiful.

  Barriers along the street showed where the protest’s old perimeter was, but it had spilled into the road. The protesters blocked the route into the bank and yelled abuse across the shoulders of harried deputies and a clot of harried-looking businessmen with armfuls of blueprints.

  Traffic had slowed to a crawl while drivers gawked at the brawl as they squeezed through the gauntlet of trucks and bodies. Javi sat on the road behind a station wagon and tried to avoid eye contact with the snotty-nosed little boy standing up in the back seat. He could taste the sour bile of second thoughts already. He didn’t need to watch a child pick its nose as well.

  His Bluetooth trilled just as the traffic stuttered ahead a few feet. Javi changed gear and edged forward as he thumbed the green Call button on the steering wheel.

  “Special Agent Merlo,” he said. “What is it?”

  “I need to see you at the morgue.” Galloway never wasted much time on pleasantries, but she’d apparently abandoned them completely today. Under the crackle of the Bluetooth, her voice was clipped and impatient. “Today.”

  Javi braked sharply as one of the protesters tripped and fell against the front of his car. His hip hit the metal with a thump, and he jumped back, hands up and mouth shaped around an apology. As he limped back into the crowd, Javi frowned at his back and then switched the expression back to the console.

  “Galloway, I have to get into the office. I have reports to—”

  “Today,” she repeated firmly. “Soon as possible.”

  She hung up. Javi tapped his finger on the steering wheel again. Until the traffic moved another—he eyeballed the road to the nearest turnoff—six feet, his snap decision would have to wait. He assumed that Galloway’s sudden summons had to do with Janet—confirmation that she was the missing Macintosh child. What he didn’t get was why she needed him to go to the lab.

  The deputies shoved a path through the crowd to let the business group into the bank. As the protesters closed ranks behind them, the outer perimeter collapsed. Cars squeezed through and away.

  Javi took the turn. The wheel of his car bumped over the base of one of the barriers, and he pulled up the preprogrammed route to the morgue from his GPS. He knew the way, but he didn’t want to spend any more time stuck in traffic.

  It took fifteen minutes to get to the highway. As he settled into the drive, he sent a quick voicemail to Sue to let her know he wasn’t going to be in. Then he called Cloister.

  “Witte.”

  “Honey, I’m going to be late for dinner tonight,” Javi drawled sarcastically. It occurred to him that it wasn’t actually that sarcastic. After all the fuss he’d made about being there for Cloister until he got the cast off, he probably owed him a heads-up he’d be late. “Galloway called. She wants to see me.”

  There was a pause. Javi could imagine the suspicious squint on Cloister’s face. He wasn’t a man who took easily to affection.

  “How is she?” Cloister finally asked.

  “I didn’t ask,” Javi said. “Irritated. Look, before she called, I was going to check on an old drunk-and-disorderly call that involved Stokes and Andrew Macintosh Junior. Can you find it?”

  “Where and when?”

  “A couple of months before they were presumably murdered,” Javi said. “It was at a restaurant out on the coast road. No charges were pressed, but there should have been a log of the call.”

  Cloister snorted. “That would have been to the sheriff’s department, not the police. It was probably at The Toast—far enough outside of town for cheaters to feel comfortable, but not far enough to avoid the occasional fight. I’ll see what I can find.”

  “You’ve still got my spare key?” Javi said.

  “Why, do you want it back?”

  “Let yourself in,” Javi said. “The stuff in the fridge, that’s food.”

  Cloister laughed and hung up.

  GALLOWAY MIGHT have been paler than usual. It was hard to tell. She gave Javi a scathing look and ignored the question when he asked if she was okay.

  “Come in,” she said as she used her whole body to prop open the door to her office. “Sit down.”

  “Did you check Janet Morrow’s DNA again?” Javi asked. The morgue didn’t give up much room for the pathologist’s office, and he had to squeeze into a chair wedged between the desk and a filing cabinet. “You could have just called me.”

  Galloway shifted her body out of the door and let it slam behind her as she limped around the desk. She braced herself gingerly against the cheap plastic, one arm tucked carefully around her stomach.

  There was no blood, no gun at her head, but Javi felt the quick pinch of adrenaline in the back of his brain anyhow. He could taste gas and blood on his tongue.

  It had probably been his own blood. He was almost certain he hadn’t gotten any of Macintosh’s in his mouth, but he couldn’t be sure, at least not until the bloodwork the hospital had ordered came back.

  He cleared his throat and tried to pin attention on the clean white T-shirt that wrinkled over Galloway’s bandage-padded stomach.

  “Should you even be here?”

  “It hurts,” she said curtly. “It would hurt at home too. Plus, if I am going to keel over dead from a minor gunshot injury, I might as well save the county the cost of transporting me here.”

  “Doctor—”

  She waved an impatient hand at him as she sat down hard behind her desk, her fingers blotched black and blue with old ink.

  “I’m fine, Agent Merlo,” she said. “It was a literal flesh wound. Mostly fat, according to the doctor who treated me. And people said I had a bad bedside manner when I was at the hospital more often. Anyway, I didn’t call you here to talk about my health. Like I said, the other day I compared Janet Morrow’s DNA with what I had on file for Tommy Macintosh. No match.”

  Reminded of the stitches in his shoulder, Javi scratched the itch of them through his shirt.

  “You were going to retest.”

  “I did. Janet Morrow’s DNA still doesn’t match the sample we had on file for Tommy Macintosh and definitely couldn’t belong to Andrew Macintosh’s child. I checked it multiple times.”

  That was not the answer Javi expected. No matter how carefully he framed his theories, he’d been convinced he was right about Janet being Macintosh’s kid. In future, he thought dourly, he should probably leave the hunches to Cloister.

  “However,” Galloway continued after she let him wallow for a second, “the dead man on the gurney in the other room is Janet Morrow’s father.”

  “Could the original samples have been contaminated somehow?” Javi asked. “Maybe a tainted batch of swabs?”

  Galloway leaned forward and pecked one-handed at her keyboard. After a second she turned the screen around to face him. A row of DNA markers stared at him.

  “According to my records, these are the DNA samples taken from the Macintosh family when they were brought in to the morgues. None of those people are related to each other,” Galloway said sharply. “One of them, based on genetic markers, is probably Native American. Nor are any of these three people related to the man we jus
t brought in to the morgue. Contamination doesn’t explain this. Corruption does.”

  She sat back in her chair and pressed her fingertips to her twitching eyelid. “No wonder Macintosh wanted to kill me. I was the closest he could get to whoever did this.”

  “Except he didn’t want to,” Javi reminded her.

  Ten years ago Andrew Macintosh was afraid his youngest child didn’t take after him enough. That he needed toughening up. But he was wrong. Janet was tough as nails and smart enough to build a whole new life for herself twice. So why would she have bothered to come back here with her dossier of evidence? What good would it have done her?

  Unless Javi’s hunch was wrong. He assumed Tommy—Janet—was the one with the reason to disappear. But she wasn’t. In fact she was the only one of the three to drive out to that coastal road with no reason to want to disappear.

  All she was worried about back then was a miserable summer at a wilderness camp. It was only later that she realized, or was told, that it was somewhere to pray the gay away.

  Andrew Macintosh liked photos, liked to collect evidence on what people close to him were up to. His daughter took after him in that too. Once she realized she’d been told one lie, she started to pick at all the rest. Javi remembered the clipped newspaper articles Janet had collected. He hadn’t seen the connection the first time he looked at them, but now he wondered if Janet had put all that together before she even got to Plenty.

  “Galloway, I need you to look up a case file for me,” Javi said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and hunted through it for the notes he’d taken on Janet’s personal effects. “It was a body found in an abandoned house in Chant. A woman. Midthirties. A week before the Macintosh case.”

  She gave him an exasperated look but pulled her monitor back around and searched. It took a minute and some very exasperated noises from her before she admitted defeat.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Apparently my predecessor was having a very bad week.”

  “What if I had a case number?” Javi asked. “Could you find that?”

  Galloway rubbed her eye again, and her knuckle bumped against the lens of her glasses. “Maybe,” she said. “There would be physical evidence, records. That would be harder to alter. What is it?”

  Javi grabbed a Post-it and scrawled down the number for the morgue photo Andrew Macintosh had carried around with him all these years. He pushed it across the desk to Galloway. Galloway pushed her glasses onto her forehead to squint at the number. A quick check brought up nothing from the digital records.

  “Give me twenty minutes,” she said as she got up. “This means that the body was logged into the system, an autopsy was done, transcriptions were generated. It will probably be in storage at Kearny Mesa, but there will be some record of this corpse.”

  She left to start the hunt. Javi waited at least fifteen of the requested minutes in the cramped office before impatience drove him to his feet and out into the hall in search of an update.

  A deputy he didn’t recognize—not from Plenty—gave him a curious look as she escorted a dull-eyed woman down the hall toward the viewing room. Javi paused midstride and turned to watch the uniformed back disappear down the hall.

  That would have been the sheriff’s department, he heard in Cloister’s drawl again. In Plenty you heard “corruption” and thought about the police, but maybe that sold the deputies short?

  His phone rang. He expected it to be Cloister with an update, but it was the FBI office number on the screen.

  “Sue?”

  “Clyde Granfeld disappeared off the face of the earth three years ago,” she told him. “His parents, however, popped up on law enforcement radar two days ago.”

  “Why?”

  “They disappeared,” Sue said. “They were reported missing by their neighbors two weeks ago, after the mother’s birthday party. It looks like they just got up and left, but the police were concerned that there might have been foul play. The neighbors told them that there had been a ‘scene’ at the party after a young woman gatecrashed. She had to be removed, and on her way out, yelled, I quote, ‘You told me she was dead!’”

  The memorial card in Janet’s effects suddenly made sense to Javi, especially when he factored in Sean’s testimony. Jessie Macintosh hadn’t disappeared to protect her child. That was just what she told Janet. She did it to protect her lover. When Tommy, or more likely Janet—who was confident, stubborn, and wanted their help to become who she really was—caused problems, the two lovers just did it again. A one-off payment to sop their conscience, the inheritance the professor had mentioned, and a postdated death notice from Janet’s half brother and stepfather.

  Except this time they didn’t have professional help to pull off the disappearing act. They hadn’t moved far enough, or maybe at all, and Janet found out they lied to her. And once you realized someone has lied to you, you start to wonder if they’ve lied to you about everything.

  Javi knew that from Kincaid. One lie was all it took to cast doubt on everything else. He dragged his attention back to the call as Sue paused to cough.

  “Sorry, where was I…. The Granfelds dismissed it at the time as just some homeless woman ranting, but later they had a vicious fight that the neighbors could hear through the walls. They assumed he’d had an affair and she’d blown up about it, so the local police want to find Clyde and make sure Mrs. Grenfeld left of her own volition. So far no luck. So do you want me to keep looking for Clyde?”

  “Hold on,” Javi said as he saw Galloway limp urgently down the hall toward him. A harried man with a stack of files pinned precariously under his chin stumbled along behind her.

  “I was right,” Galloway said triumphantly. She waved a file under his nose. “Whatever happened, they deleted the digital record without destroying the actual evidence. And since these records didn’t show up in our files, they have just been shuffled around down in the archive instead of being sent over to the new storage facility. A young woman was found dead from what looked like an overdose. Her body was never claimed. There’s a note in here from the deputy that says the father was incapable. And it was cremated accordingly. The DNA on file here is the same as what we have in our records for Jessie Macintosh. Someone swapped the files.”

  Her voice was sharp with indignation at the idea. Javi regretted that he had to make it worse.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. Galloway wrinkled her nose at him. “I think they swapped the bodies.”

  Galloway blanched slightly as she caught up with him. “Son of a bitch,” she muttered. “That’s why the bodies were burned.”

  The one thing everyone said about Macintosh was that he wasn’t a man to let things go. If his family had just disappeared, he would never have stopped searching for them. He had the resources, the favors owed, to do a good job of it too. So someone gave Macintosh the closure he needed to let it go—bodies to bury and the blame for it. At another time Macintosh might have asked more questions, demanded they recheck the DNA, but he was primed to accept the bodies as his family, even if they were burned beyond recognition.

  Javi plucked the folder out of her hand as she absorbed that information. He folded it open and flicked through the pages until he found the deputy’s report. It could have been Galloway’s predecessor who swapped out the bodies, but Javi thought he’d have gotten rid of the paper trail. More likely it was someone who knew about the bodies but didn’t have access to the records—like the deputy in charge of the cases who knew there was no next of kin.

  The name was printed in too-deep, careful block letters on the last page. Javi hadn’t expected to recognize it.

  “Agent Merlo?” Sue said in his ear. “Did you hear me? Do you need me to—”

  He hung up on her and called Cloister on his way out the door. It rang through to voicemail.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “FASS!” CLOISTER barked as he let go of Bourneville’s collar. She took off, and dirt scattered from under her paws as Collins took o
ff at a run across the training field. The bite suit made him waddle and swear as he ran.

  The last dog to do the run was Kit, a heavy black lab who compensated for being a six-year-old’s Kitty Kat in his civilian life by being aggressively alpha on the job—or maybe that was his handler, who’d made a dramatic leap to spin the runner around. Bourneville didn’t bother with showmanship. She raced up on Collins, cut between his legs, and latched on to his arm as he stumbled.

  She snarled as her teeth ripped into the padding and then shook her body viciously until her weight dragged Collins’s arm down. He staggered and tried to swing his arm back into the air. Bourneville bit down harder, the snarl that rattled out of her chest furious and almost metallic sounding, and muscled him to the ground.

  Collins howled and rolled around gracelessly while she snarled over him and shook his arm like a terrier shook a rat. Her ears were pinned flat, and frothy drool splattered the ground and bite suit as Collins struggled.

  “Bourneville,” Cloister snapped as he jogged over. He grabbed her harness and felt the vibration of her growl up his arm. “Aus! Let him up.”

  The growl cut off instantly, and Bon pricked her ears back up. She let go of Collins’s arm and backed up two steps, tail up and ready to wag and attention on Cloister as she waited.

  “Good girl,” he told her as he pulled her favorite throw toy out of his pocket. He tossed it in the air, and she jumped up to grab it. It got a shake, and then she flopped down on her stomach to chew on it assiduously. Most of her toys lasted a week. Luckily they were mostly made from Cloister’s old T-shirts braided into a rope. “Good girl, Bourneville.”

  Cloister reached down and offered Collins a hand up.

  “Shit,” Collins muttered as Cloister hauled him back to his feet. “I mean, I think I did. Jesus.”

  Over on the fence, Kit’s trainer laughed. Cloister slapped Collins on the back.

  “Did it help?” he asked.

  “No!” Collins wiped his mouth on his sleeve and made a disgusted face as he realized it was covered in dog drool. He clumsily pawed it off with a gloved hand and looked over at Bon as she chewed and wagged her tail happily. “Don’t you need to pen her up or something? Until she chills out?”